I found this poem in a "take a poem, leave a poem" box in someone's front yard in my neighborhood the first week after moving to Ann Arbor to start my masters degree at the University of Michigan. I was deeply moved by the depiction of a person going to a tree for comfort and leaving transformed. I was able to contact the poet, Dawn Thompson, via email and hear more about her work. In my setting for voice and piano, you can hear the wind rustling through the leaves, the main character's sobs as she cries "all the ways [her] life had not happened," and the slow, resonant presence of the tree.